in reply to Help with designing a program.

To elaborate a little on bitingduck's reply: run a script every 10 minutes to collect the data and write it to a database. It's likely that DBD::SQLite wrapped up by DBI is all you need. If you've not dealt with databases already take a look at RFC: Databases made easy to get started.

So: you create two scripts. The first one does whatever work is required to collect the data and write it to the database and is probably run as a cron job or similar. The second script is run by users to get the latest version of the data from the database.

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